Che sera, Sarah
La Cieca has just heard (from no less a source than Sarah Billinghurst herself!) a tidbit that will no doubt interest Daniel Stephen Johnson among many others. It seems that the Met will produce Prince Igor in 2013 with Valery Gergiev (naturally) conducting and Dmitri Tcherniakov directing. The Prince himself will be Ildar Abdrazakov.
Only in his DREAMS would Peter Gelb be the MUSICAL… of the MET:
In 1998, Gergiev conducted an edition of Prince Igor that had a radically different and far more dramatically appropriate ending with extremely beautiful music.
In the opera, the Polovetsi have defeated Igor’s forces and captured him and his son; when they escape the Polovetsi slaughter everyone. There’s no dramatic reason for the “happy ending” we usually see. In the version Gergiev brought to the US, it’s obvious that there’s been a general calamity; in a finale very similar to a similar situation in Rimsky’s Invisible City of Kitezh, the populace transforms ethereally into souls entering the afterlife. It made absolute sense and was very beautiful.
Whose Prince Igor? -Borodin’s, Rimsky-Korsakov’s, Glazunov’s or Faliek’s ??
It’s a very confusing issue. My Soviet era full score actually credits at the beginning of each separate number who wrote it, and who orchestrated it. I don’t know how scholarly this is. Act 3 is the problem, as there was no libretto, and it seems Glazunov filled in the bits – including the trio before the escape, which is one moment of dramatic conflict – who knows if that was Borodin’s intention.
Where I felt Gergiev’s recording was subjective caprice masquerading as scholarship was his use of the Prologue’s opening chorus to conclude the opera – in my Soviet fs it actually says the final chorus (that Gergiev said was lightweight and unsuitable) as actually completed and orchestrated by Borodin. So was it not used because Gergiev didn’t like it??
I’m not sure anyone will ever get to the bottom of what should happen in this opera, because I’m pretty damn certain Borodin didn’t know himself!
For a thumbnail sketch of Stasov’s original ending, see Taruskin’s article linked by UnfaithfulZerbinetta at 9.2 in this thread.